How a Meditation Practice Can Help with Anxiety, Depression & Trauma
Meditation is central to spiritual practice, helping us calm the mind and gain insight into the habits of mind. In Buddhism, meditation is key for cultivating compassion, bodhicitta, and wisdom. Meditation can help us maintain balance and healthy perspective when confronted with afflictive emotions / mental events like fear, anxiety, despair, and self-criticism. There is accumulating clinical evidence that mindfulness meditation can be helpful for managing depression and anxiety. Disorders like major depression, anxiety, and post-traumatic stress are common, affecting about 1 in 4 people in their lifetime. They can cause great suffering and disability and usually require professional help like psychotherapy or medications to get out of once they manifest. Clinical practice and research over the past 30 years has found mindfulness meditation, done as part of a group therapy, can be as effective as medications to prevent recurrence of depression in people with chronic depression (Kuyken, 2016), and to treat generalized anxiety disorder (Hoge, 2023).
This experiential all-day workshop will explore ways that meditation can be helpful for managing our afflictive emotions like fear, anxiety, despair, and self-criticism. Inspired by the Mind and Life format, we will blend didactic instruction and discussion on theory and practice of meditation-based interventions (e.g. mindfulness, acceptance, compassion, and self-compassion) and empirical support from clinical trials, cognitive neuroscience, and neuroimaging with meditation instruction and practice, group discussion, and experiential exercises.
This public workshop/class includes psychoeducation about mental health and practice of empirically supported methods for practicing meditation, stress management and meta-cognitive emotional regulation. Participation in this public workshop/class does not constitute psychotherapy, treatment of a disorder, or a professional treatment relationship with the presenter.
Online via Zoom
Member: $100
Non-Member: $125
Become a Member
Give what you can. No one turned away.
About Anthony King, Ph.D.
